The first thing that comes to mind after seeing “curses” and “Python” in the same sentence is “go away or I shall taunt you a second time”. After spending a while trying to write text-mode interfaces, it only starts ringing truer.

Coding period for Google Summer of Code 2011 officially began last week. Because of exams and some subsequent issues involving my university I had been lagging behind my intended schedule. With help from Damian Johnson though I was able to get my feet wet quickly and start integrating menus in arm. Luckily, the arm codebase was very well-written and neatly organized which simplified my task and allowed me to end up with a functional implementation by the end of first week:

(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

The code can be accessed via my Git repository at Tor Project. In addition to that I also now own a shiny krkhan@torproject.org email address which is currently setup to forward messages to my primary mail.

Menus still needs a bit of polishing as the controls are not completely intuitive and I still need to bug-hunt thoroughly on varying screen sizes. For the time being they work well enough to control all aspects of arm except for quitting or resetting Tor, which I shall be fixing after figuring out a few quirks.

“As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.” — Buddy Hackett

[…] Meanwhile Kamran Khan has been hacking on the arm codebase, finishing his first week with a functional menus prototype. The implementation details turned out to be trickier than I’d anticipated and will need more polish, but my hat’s off to him for being able to dive into a completely new codebase and develop such a substantial contribution in so little time (thanks, Kamran!). For more on this see Kamran’s blog. […]